Reward & Punishment

Reward & Punishment

I'm finally going to take a Saturday night off: Tonight I'll be able to relax a bit with friends and maybe watch some TV. I like to reward myself for accomplishing tasks that I've set out for myself to do. To be able to earn tonight's luxury, I had to slog through Friday night and this morning to finish off some presentation slides that I'll need to use on Monday morning.

Rewards need not be something elaborate: even a good dinner of nasi padang at Sari Bundo or a Saturday night watching Liverpool live on ESPN are great joys to be savoured (and Liverpool is playing Arsenal tonight). Every task that I do is tied to some minor reward like this. There's always a carrot-on-a-stick to drive me on. I have to earn my dinner, my TV session or a Saturday morning movie at Plaza Blok M. And rewards taste a lot sweeter after you've thoroughly earned them.

Now what about punishment for failures? Well, guilt often is punishment enough. Or fear for not being prepared for an important meeting or presentation is something that is as great a torment as a smoker being deprived of cigarettes. We recoil from pain and veer towards pleasure. Peace of mind is the greatest pleasure of all.

But I prefer reward as a positive way of pushing me forward. And I realised long ago that the things that give me the greatest joys are the simple things in life: an hour at the coffee shop reading, an Indomie breakfast with kopi tubruk, a mug of Bintang after a tough day's work, a new novel by Milan Kundera. To quote Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music: "These are a few of my favourite things"--they do not cost a lot of money but give me a lot of joy.

Money can be a good form of reward too. But most of the time, I can bypass that. I believe that by focussing on accomplishing the immediate task well, the larger issues, like money, will take care of itself.

Watching Liverpool play tonight will be a great pleasure but another loss to Arsenal will be a pain I'm not sure I can endure...